Elf handed his phone to Lewin and said, "Is it true?" To which Lewin, the nine-year Rangers TV-booth vet, responded, meekly, "Yeeeeeeah ..."

But, says Elf today, "we've known since Day One this day might come, that if a job came along he'd take it." Because Lewin's good -- one of the best, good enough for national even when the locals didn't want him any longer, a big reasons folks dialed up Rangers broadcasts long before AL titles were in sight. And "once we caught wind of it a month ago," says Elf, "we were all sitting tight."

Lewin's out as of Friday, NYC-bound. Which means "we've gotta go through the whole process" of looking for a replacement," says Elf. "But we're gonna search from all over the country." Till then he'll go it alone, with a possible plus-one here and there. "I carried it by myself at the Ticket for 18 years. But it's so much easier with someone there. What's going to be, I don't know. The Hardline did the same thing: Mike and Corby would bring in someone and see how it would go. And after a while they figured, 'What the hell do we need to spend the money for?' And it worked out well. But WFAN's in the CBS family, so he'll call in and we'll futz around. The search is on. We're gonna win."